Sixty-five grade 5-6 children were tested on a verbal recall task involving material of varying semantic and syntactic content. There was no difference between best and poorest readers in their performance on random lists of words, but there were clear differences on meaningful sentences and on syntactically well-formed but semantically anomalous sentences. Semantic and syntactic regularities provide cues which may facilitate performance on all but the random lists of words, if the child has knowledge of the structural possibilities of English and the acceptable word combinations. The results on the recall task shows, therefore, that not all children are equally able to make use of semantic and syntactic knowledge in processing oral language and that this knowledge is related to their reading competence. The same linguistic information may be used by efficient adult readers in processing textual materials. Thus it seems likely that there may be a threshold level of proficiency prerequisite to reading development. (Author)